“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” In January, 2020, President Donald Trump made those comments (his first on the subject) about a worrisome new respiratory disease sweeping through Wuhan, China.

Trump’s instinctual effort to downplay the severity of the virus and soft-pedal the necessity for mobilizing a national response may have been politically understandable – after all, the Chinese government spent months denying the virus existed. But that decision set in motion a predictable series of attacks and counter attacks that escalated until balanced decisions about public health, the economy, and maximizing our general welfare could no longer be reached.

Once the battle lines were drawn, battalions of Trumpers and Never- Trumpers converted every public health decision into a new episode in their culture war. Lockdowns became a red/blue issue, as did masks, social distancing, vaccinations, and vaccine mandates.

In the “mainstream media,” blue tribe warriors sanctimoniously position support for all forms of social and economic sacrifice as a moral imperative to save lives and reach the promised land of “Covid zero.” In these venues, any opposition to “following the science” by embracing public health proclamations is usually ridiculed as yet another example of red tribe ignorance, bias, or racism.

To be fair, many of those caricatures are well deserved. However, this maelstrom of political posturing has swallowed even data-driven objections to certain public health measures.

The Omicron variant is now the dominant global strain of this disease. It has oozed across borders (closed and otherwise), leapt across oceans (even to “zero Covid” havens like Singapore and New Zealand), pierced the illusion of mask protection, and undermined the effectiveness of social distancing.

The R-value (reproduction value) of Omicron appears to be the highest of any Covid strain yet. The reproduction value equals the number of people each infected individual will infect, on average.

UK data revealed that the probability a person with Omicron will infect their household is three times greater than with the Delta variant. The R-value among all close contacts appears to be two times that of Delta.

“We can’t prevent it,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said last week. Israel has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Bennett’s blunt comments reflect a growing consensus: the virus is spreading too fast to stop with testing, distancing, and lockdowns.

This radical change in transmissibility heralds a new era in the pandemic. Breakthrough infections are now commonplace. Antibodies acquired from a previous case of Alpha or Delta do not necessarily prevent reinfection by Omicron. And, the vaccines are less effective at preventing Omicron infection than they were with previous strains.

Lest the “anti-vaxxers” take that last statement as a Pyrrhic victory, let’s remember that preventing infection never was the primary goal of the vaccination effort. The real intent was to reduce the frequency of serious infections and deaths.

On that score, although data is still being compiled, the vaccines available in the US continue to work well for roughly six months after each jab. This means our experience with Omicron will continue to reflect two divergent narratives.

The simplest way to express the difference in severity between Omicron and Delta is by comparing the ratio of cases to hospitalizations and deaths for each variant. According to data compiled by the New York Times, case counts in December 2021 were 120% versus the prior year, while hospitalizations were only 57% and deaths 36% of the rates seen in 2020.

Here are the hard truths emerging from the latest Covid data.

Most people around the globe will be exposed to Omicron. Most vaccinated people will not become seriously ill. Deaths will likely occur at a far lower rate than with previous variants, and the majority of deaths will occur among the unvaccinated.

Despite these trends, many public health experts, politicians, and others in the public space are determined to continue stressing the contagiousness of Omicron. They tend to focus on escalating case counts, with some of them attempting to justify potential lockdowns, social distancing and masking mandates, and advocating increased vaccination rates.

These responses are consistent with the tribal pandemic playbook. They favor a more narrow definition of public health focused on disease prevalence and the serious risks that exist for elderly, immunecompromised, and unvaccinated people. But this approach downplays compelling arguments for a broader definition of public health: one that includes mental health, economic security, and educational progress for children.

It is now clear that we will not “beat Covid” by eradicating it from the human biome. Like most human viruses, Covid-19 appears to be evolving into an endemic disease. Endemic diseases maintain a baseline level of infection in a given population even without external inputs. Many cold and flu varieties occupy endemic niches.

It is time to acknowledge both the massive transmissibility and declining severity of Covid-19-Omicron. And the fact that severe disease outcomes continue to be dominated by those who have refused to be vaccinated. There will be no Covid-zero. We must focus on finding a path that employs a broader definition of public health, and ultimately leads to herd immunity.